Over the past year, AI features in recruiting tools have seen significant adoption. But if you ask TA Teams whether AI has changed how they actually hire, most of them will say no. Individual productivity is up, but organizational transformation hasn’t followed.
At the same time, AI tools on the candidate side are flooding employers with credible applications from candidates who may not be seriously interested. So what needs to shift for AI to genuinely transform recruiting for employers and candidates alike?
My guest this week is Nikos Moraitakis, Co-Founder and CEO of Workable. In our conversation, he shares why productivity gains haven’t driven real change, how AI agents could take over sourcing and screening, why the recruiter role faces a dramatic shift, and what all this means for candidate experience.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Why AI adoption hasn’t yet driven significant transformation
• AI-driven applications with low candidate intent
• How AI capabilities have advanced in the last few months
• Using agentic AI like a staffing agency
• AI automates tasks, not jobs.
• Why recruiters need to focus on the bottom of the funnel, not the top
• Trust, transparency, and human oversight
• What hiring looks like in the future
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00:00
Matt Alder
AI adoption in talent acquisition is growing, but real transformation isn’t happening quite as quickly. So what needs to change for AI to really reshape how companies actually hire? Keep listening to find out. Support for this podcast comes from Workable. Workable is known for its award winning applicant tracking and HR platform. Used by more than 30,000 companies worldwide to hire and manage talent more efficiently, they’ve recently rolled out two major product updates. First, they’ve completely rebuilt their reporting suite from the ground up. Workable now delivers enterprise ready data and reporting, giving teams the ability to create custom dashboards, tables, charts and pivot views using any hiring or HR data in the system. It makes it much easier to track hiring performance, workforce trends and ROI without juggling spreadsheets or external BI tools. They’ve also introduced something really interesting called Workable Agent, a new AI recruiting teammate built directly into the ATS. I actually had the chance to see this in action at a recent event and it’s pretty impressive.
01:17
Matt Alder
You start by having a conversation about the role and the agent drafts the job brief, searches through a database of more than 400 million candidate profiles, engages candidates, screens them against your requirements, and delivers a shortlist of qualified interview ready candidates. It essentially gives your team full recruiting agency level capabilities directly inside your ats. If you’re looking to optimize your recruiting and HR processes and improve your ROI along the way, I definitely recommend checking out Workable. You can learn more@workable.com or by visiting their LinkedIn page.
02:13
Matt Alder
Hi there, welcome to episode 781 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Over the past year, AI features in recruiting tools have seen some adoption, but if you ask TA teams whether AI has changed how they actually hire, most of them will say no. Individual productivity is up, but organizational transformation hasn’t followed. At the same time, AI tools on the candidate side are flooding employers with credible applications from candidates who may not be seriously interested in the role. So what needs to shift for AI to genuinely transform recruiting from both an employer and a candidate perspective? My guest this week is Nikos Moraitakis, co founder and CEO at Workable.
03:04
Matt Alder
In our conversation, he shares why productivity gains haven’t driven real change, how AI agents could take over sourcing and screening in the future, why the recruiter role faces a dramatic shift, and what this all means for the candidate experience.
03:20
Matt Alder
Hi Nikos, and welcome back to the podcast.
03:23
Nikos Moraitakis
Hello. Nice to see you again.
03:26
Matt Alder
Always a pleasure to talk to you. For people who may not come across you and your work before, can you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
03:34
Nikos Moraitakis
I’m one of the co founders and the CEO of Workable. Workable started off as a simple applicant lighting system. Today it’s a widely used HR platform and we have served 30,000 companies who do recruiting and HR management with us. And these days we are also an agentic system for recruiting, which is our latest product and what I think is going to be what workup is going to be known for in the future.
04:01
Matt Alder
Absolutely. And I wanted to kind of track back to when we spoke last year because things are sort of moving so quickly. It’s good to sort of get that sort of 12 month perspective on it really. So last time that we spoke were talking about AI was starting to handle some of the admin side of recruiting, freeing up recruiters to do higher value work. How has that sort of matched up in terms of vision and reality over the last 12 months? What are you seeing in the market at the moment?
04:29
Nikos Moraitakis
I don’t think you talk contradicting ways to see it. One thing is that just like us and many other vendors have introduced a lot of AI powered features within their workflow tools, ats, whatever it is that people are using, and these are fantastic tools, they do provide a lot of personal productivity, they do save a lot of time. And the adoption we’ve seen, at least on end, and I would be surprised if it’s different elsewhere, is massive. We processed 100 million profiles on screening last year. 25% Of the content is AI generated. The majority of users are actually using these features. Sounds great, right? Fantastic. Great adoption.
05:13
Matt Alder
All right.
05:14
Nikos Moraitakis
We’re going to burn 10 trillion tokens this year among our users. It’s insane.
05:20
Nikos Moraitakis
The question though is that did this translate to a transformation in the world of recruiting? I bet if you ask most people, they will tell you no.
05:29
Nikos Moraitakis
We didn’t really change anything for us. And it’s an interesting thing to wonder why. That links to something more general about the use of these AI capabilities in software. We are now realizing that individual productivity does not always translate to organizational productivity. We can get more productive, we can save some time, et cetera, but unless we change the way we work to take advantage of those tools, you don’t really see a huge transformation. I think theme for this year as everybody goes into these authentic systems is going to be to jump from the individual to the organizational productivity. Things that change the way we work.
06:11
Matt Alder
Yeah, I completely agree with you there. I think that’s one of the things that we’ve kind of really seen at an individual level, super productive. But unless you kind of really rethink how you do hiring and how AI adds the value there, then productivity doesn’t come through at the corporate level. Going to dive into some of the specifics of this as we get through the conversation. But before we do though, I just wanted to get your take on what you think the biggest challenges are that are facing talent acquisition teams this year from all the companies that you work with.
06:42
Nikos Moraitakis
Beyond the more obvious and macro things like they need to get a lot more done with fewer resources, which is a theme. I mean hiring is up, even hiring for recruiters is up this year with typically one wouldn’t expect with the state of the market. The market is moving a lot. So recruiters have to do a lot of work and most of them would rightfully complain that they don’t have the resources they wanted. At least that’s what we hear from our users.
07:13
Nikos Moraitakis
I think one interesting thing that’s come up recently is all those AI assisted applications, they’re controversial. Very few people really understand what the problem is. Most people think they’re just fake. It’s worse, they’re legit applications. If it was fake, we would make you a friend and just delete them. But they are legit applications. A lot of candidates are going to use AI assisted tools.
07:36
Nikos Moraitakis
However, very often they are very low intent and the tools that enable them, you know, still they’re very early in their life cycle and they’re a little bit, I don’t want to say spammy but you know, they create some noise in the process. They create an email address between them and the candidate so generally TA departments, what they report is that now have a lot more candidates. A lot of them are not responsive. Perhaps they have done with en masse with very low intent. But I still need to spend the time.
08:10
Nikos Moraitakis
And you know what’s worse? Because they are AI targeted, they’re pretty good. You know, these tools don’t just spam, they spam relevant jobs. So you get to have an interest in candidates that look good to you and you’re going to spend time on and perhaps are going to be not very fruitful. So the whole thing there is a. Is a bit of a pain for the to give you an indication right.
08:32
Nikos Moraitakis
Now among workable customers, I checked it, about 10% of the applications globally are coming from this.
08:41
Nikos Moraitakis
We have created tools that can identify them, that can fit them. It helps you work with them differently. And overall, probably what employers are going to do is they’re going to use AI to deal with an AI created problem there.
08:54
Matt Alder
But I think that’s where the pressure comes from also to kind of rethink recruitment processes and recruitment tools and these kind of things. Because this isn’t something that’s going to go away, is it? It’s just going to get more sophisticated and better from the candidate side.
09:06
Nikos Moraitakis
Recruiting is a marketplace, it’s an information.
09:08
Nikos Moraitakis
Exchange process, it’s a discovery process for the candidate.
09:11
Nikos Moraitakis
We had a system with job boards, with LinkedIn to create that flow information.
09:15
Nikos Moraitakis
And find the right people for the right job.
09:18
Nikos Moraitakis
But right now this funnel is opening.
09:20
Nikos Moraitakis
Up a lot with AI tools.
09:22
Nikos Moraitakis
Market’s going to become noisier and noisier one and it’s only. You’re only going to be able to deal with it by using machines on your end.
09:30
Matt Alder
Absolutely. I suppose just to give us some context around that and everything that’s kind of going on, as said earlier, AI is moving very quickly. You’re obviously building with AI, you’re sort of, you know, kind of really exposed to what’s possible, what’s not possible. I mean, how significant is the moving capabilities over the last 12 months? I mean, what can AI do in recruiting that wasn’t possible 12 months ago?
09:54
Nikos Moraitakis
I can give you very pragmatic example.
09:58
Nikos Moraitakis
A few weeks ago we launched for the first time the agenti the work of legend. Now this is not a copilot, this isn’t asking where can I help you do your job faster or do part of it, but it’s asking is there a piece, self contained piece of work that I can pick up and do completely for you what the work ablates and does. The best way to describe it is it replaces what an agency would do for you. You know what an agency does, you go to them, they help you build a spec, they go and source the job.
10:36
Nikos Moraitakis
Basically candidates, they find a bunch of people that fit the spec, they show you in an objective manner how they fit the spec and some summary with them and they give you a short list of people who are fully vetted and engaged and are ready to go. It’s a very self contained thing. All of us have bought this service. We know exactly how the service is being provided.
10:55
Nikos Moraitakis
Essentially right now, by buying the workup.
10:58
Nikos Moraitakis
Latent, you are buying a digital agency, so to speak, that operates within your own ideas and does all these things.
11:08
Nikos Moraitakis
And at that point this has serious implications about the process because Suddenly what the experience of users is that, you.
11:16
Nikos Moraitakis
Know, they open up a job and three or four days later the system has sourced 100 candidates, reviewed screens, got the inbound applications, talked to the candidates to clarify things, get additional information, etc. And these you have, you know, has like four or five people waiting for you that you could interview and hire.
11:36
Matt Alder
It’s sort of an indication of sort of how recruiting and roles and those kind of things are being redefined, isn’t it? I mean, where do you think the role of recruiters sits? If the technology can deliver this aspect of it, what is it that recruiters need to spend their time doing? How do they need to rethink their processes to really, you know, to accommodate what AI is doing, but also to get the most value out of what it can bring to an organization?
12:03
Nikos Moraitakis
Let’s confuse the jobs with the tasks.
12:05
Nikos Moraitakis
A job is a collection of tasks, and sometimes more than just that.
12:11
Nikos Moraitakis
So the recruiter’s job is it included.
12:16
Nikos Moraitakis
Sourcing the job and doing all these things. But it’s not just that.
12:20
Nikos Moraitakis
And arguably you could say that part was if you could do it well and get reliably good results out of it, very often you would opt to not do it like people do.
12:31
Nikos Moraitakis
That’s why there’s an agency, huge industry of recruiting and staffing companies that can.
12:37
Nikos Moraitakis
Take the job off your plate. And very often it can also promise to maybe do it a bit better than you, I don’t know, because they.
12:44
Nikos Moraitakis
Understand that domain, those kinds of jobs, they have expertise, they know how to run it efficiently.
12:50
Nikos Moraitakis
So essentially the recruiter’s job is going to start gravitating more towards the bottom of the funnel rather than the top. I think seeing what the workable agent does, and I assume that in the future many other systems would have similar things. There will be a lot of agent.
13:08
Nikos Moraitakis
Type applications that do this bit.
13:11
Nikos Moraitakis
I can tell you for sure that they would be able to completely take over the top of the farmland. And the work of recruiters is going to drop to the bottom, one could argue.
13:20
Nikos Moraitakis
I mean, I believe that it’s actually a good thing. The AI doesn’t just do the same things that you would do, it does a lot more. It would get everything synced up and dying. It would review everything, everyone, meticulously, comprehensively, only on the job specs and nothing else, without any biases beyond respect itself.
13:42
Nikos Moraitakis
It’s going to do it relentlessly. It’s going to do it to the 100 guy who came in on Sunday night. It’s Going to follow up with everyone. It’s going to. It’s going to compress the time. It’s going to do everything in three or four days. So that part of the job is going to be done better by AI and get better results and references are going to do. Things have more to do with the.
14:05
Nikos Moraitakis
Interaction with the candidate, with the interaction of the teams, the organization of the work, the supervision of the work. I think it’s a good change, actually, for them.
14:14
Nikos Moraitakis
That was the worst part of the.
14:15
Nikos Moraitakis
Joke, to be honest with you.
14:19
Matt Alder
I think that anything that means the 500th person to apply gets the same attention and scrutiny as the first person to apply has to be a good thing because this isn’t a race, is it? We want. Employers want quality candidates. They want the right fit that doesn’t necessarily equate to when someone applied. So I think it’s a really interesting point from that perspective. One of the big things around this, though, is trusts and safeguards and transparency and obviously regulations in various parts of the world. What do you think is the most important aspect of that? What safeguards need to be in place so people trust the AI to do this? And where does the human oversight need to sit?
15:00
Matt Alder
What’s your view on that?
15:01
Nikos Moraitakis
Before I move into the technical part.
15:03
Nikos Moraitakis
Of the conversation here, as a product.
15:06
Nikos Moraitakis
Designer, my experience with it is that people are going to be positively surprised.
15:14
Nikos Moraitakis
At how good it is so long as they.
15:18
Nikos Moraitakis
They have the opportunity to observe it. Yes, I think most of our anxiety.
15:23
Nikos Moraitakis
Comes from this thing being a black.
15:25
Nikos Moraitakis
Box or this thing being operating like a magic wand. But going to the technical discussion, how do we do it at workable? At workable, we have the benefit that we already have your entire workflow mapped.
15:39
Nikos Moraitakis
Out in a tool and it has.
15:41
Nikos Moraitakis
Rules and rules about what the users can do and user rights. So basically the agent is a user number one. You can feel safe that you know what can you do? The same things that any employee could do. So first of all, we limit the amount of fear that we have he.
15:58
Nikos Moraitakis
Might do something strange.
16:00
Nikos Moraitakis
He would do what the junior employee.
ould do, operating the same tool and the same rights.
16:04
Nikos Moraitakis
You’d be able to see everything that he does. You’ll be able to see it thinking in every decision, which arguably for an employee you don’t. You’ll see transcripts of every conversation it’s had and because it’s guardrailed, to stick to the process and to stick to the specific. At the end of the day, the way you’re going to see its work is by seeing someone pretty intelligently picking up everyone, writing them against the spec, giving you a clear picture, seeing what it did, who it spoke to, sending you a message and advanced. It is candid because it meets all the criteria and it does this and it does that. So the observability and explainability aspect in my mind is the most important one. And also I don’t think that’s even a very clever thing to say. Obviously when you step in it disengages.
16:53
Nikos Moraitakis
You can say now I’m talking to the so that we don’t cross talk.
16:58
Nikos Moraitakis
I think most of the users consensus because they haven’t yet imagined how this would work and many of us, me as well in the early days, I would imagine something a little bit more Black boxing zimmy.
17:13
Nikos Moraitakis
Yeah, kind of thing.
17:14
Nikos Moraitakis
But what you really see is you see another user in the system working alongside you. Only this user works day and night, tirelessly, documents everything and never goes away from the script. Systems like workables which are embedded in.
17:30
Nikos Moraitakis
An ads also would have guardrails around.
17:36
Nikos Moraitakis
And what it does also, I know many users are very often when they hear bias, their mind goes into say choosing women over men or people from your colleagues with a very human instinct. If I were to say an AI system doesn’t have those instincts and doesn’t have that information. I mean the AI agent doesn’t even.
18:03
Nikos Moraitakis
Have to know the other characteristics of the candidate. Definitely not the protected ones, but even.
18:11
Nikos Moraitakis
Ones that aren’t strictly protected but are not relevant for the job. So you have a system that is very objective. It only looks at the things that matter.
18:19
Nikos Moraitakis
And you know that it does because.
18:20
Nikos Moraitakis
Technically we can completely prevent it from doing anything else. As a renewed technology, we need to have a chance to experience and observe it, to build our own trust.
18:32
Matt Alder
That kind of transparency of seeing those stages is obviously a really important aspect to this. As a final question for you, taking everything that we’ve talked about, if we look ahead to the future, what do you think hiring is going to look like? Because as you said right at the start is going to drive some fundamental changes to how we think about hiring. Where do you think we’re going with this?
18:57
Nikos Moraitakis
Look, first of all, having built an agent and having seen users use it, I haven’t used it myself. I am very confident that one way or another, the top of the funnel is going to be handled by agents very soon. When you do it once, you’ll never go back to the old way. It’s that kind of improvement that you’re definitely sticking with that. So I think it would replace it to a great extent on all of the top of the funnel. As I said, the recruiters work is going to move towards the bottom end of the foundry. They would have to. The job of the recruiter or even what a good recruiter is might change.
19:45
Nikos Moraitakis
Today you have some excellent recruiters like very vulnerable to the teams because they’re really good and organized with the tooling that companies like us provide to go and do that top of the funnel very effectively and essentially bring value to the organization by fetching the right people. I think the value of that skill will diminish because agents will eventually completely supersede that and the will become a lot more consultative. So the ones who are good consultants who can advise their internal team on what to do, who can add judgment onto it with his own judgment, not collection of information. I called someone and I noted a few things down. There’s not judgment and the AI will do it better. So I think what’s going to happen with recruiters is this.
20:36
Nikos Moraitakis
And the other thing where I don’t know exactly where it’s going to lead is that I’m seeing transform the process. So let me describe to you something that will sound to you a little bit like science fiction.
20:47
Matt Alder
Please do. Please do.
20:49
Nikos Moraitakis
Today I post a job with the agent. Somebody applies to that job. 10:30Pm On a Saturday, 10:31, they get an acknowledgment from the AI. Hi, I’m the AI. I work on the behalf of the recruiter.
21:06
Nikos Moraitakis
I got your application. Thank you very much. I’ve done a couple of questions for you. Can I ask you a few questions? And you click a link and it asks you a couple of questions that clearly show that this thing has read your resume, understands it and is asking for specific things that are not in there. The question might involve. You said you had the team of five people, but were they outbound or inbound? So it understands your job. In fact it does the sensor job better than most people who did the screening on did it.
21:39
Nikos Moraitakis
If your application fit and those questions clarify the rest of it. He will tell you on the spot. Thank you. We will reach out to you and you will get the calendar invite and you can choose a meeting on Monday morning with a hiring manager.
21:56
Nikos Moraitakis
What does it do to candidate experience? The biggest drive candidates has is that they put it in a black box. Nobody responds. They don’t know what happened. Weeks passed, Somebody calls, they lost a little bit of faith. They thought maybe they didn’t even understand their resume. So I think when you have such a radical 10x shift in the talented experience side, together with AI tools that apply with higher volumes, it’s going to make this job market a lot more liquid. I don’t know what the stats to recruit this, but I think the biggest change I bet is going to come from that.
22:29
Matt Alder
Yeah, I completely agree and I think that there are loads of other implications for that. If you can hire the best people that quickly, it’s going to be a very interesting couple of years. Definitely. Nikos, thank you very much for talking to me.
22:42
Nikos Moraitakis
Thank you so much. It’s always a pleasure. Let’s see you next year and we’ll see how that works.
22:48
Matt Alder
Absolutely. Talk to you then.
22:50
Nikos Moraitakis
Thank you very much.
22:52
Matt Alder
My thanks to Nikos. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for
